An Artifact Once Was Just Home

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Rita Ascione is one of the last living residents of the Lower East Side building that is now the Tenement Museum. She recently returned with her daughter, Valerie Carmody, to see her old apartment.CreditCreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

Rita Ascione made her way slowly up the steep, narrow staircase at 97 Orchard Street, on the Lower East Side, one recent morning, letting out a few moans and groans along the way. Her daughter Valerie Carmody tried to jolly her along. “Come on, Ma, you’re always telling me that you used to fly up these stairs.”

Fine, but that was 80 years ago.

In the early 1930s, Mrs. Ascione, now 88, was Rita Bonofiglio, a small child living on the building’s fourth floor with her mother, Maria, and her much older sister, Rose, surrounded by Italian families like the Baldizzis and the Raspizzios, and Jewish families like the Rosenthals, the latest in a long, slow-breaking wave of immigrants dating at least back to 1863, when 97 Orchard was built. Some 7,000 tenants have come and gone, about 1,500 of them identified by name, according to estimates by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which bought the building in the late 1980s.

Mrs. Ascione is the last surviving resident with a memory of the building, where she lived from the ages of 6 to 9, as nearly as she can recall. The only other living resident is her cousin Vincent, now 80, who was an infant when the building was condemned and the residents evicted, in 1935.

Invited by the Tenement Museum, Mrs. Ascione was making a sentimental return to the old place, along with her daughter; her granddaughter Gina Carmody; and Gina’s fiancé, Anthony Gerahty, in part out of curiosity, in part to share her recollections of a place and time now almost beyond the reach of human memory.

A step at a time, Mrs. Ascione ascended past the second floor, where her close friend Josephine Baldizzi helped the museum create a facsimile of the Baldizzi apartment and left a colorful oral history, which visitors now hear when touring the museum. The voice of Josie, as she was known, rang out in the kitchen: “She was extra clean, my mother. Shine-’Em-Up Sadie, they called her.” Mrs. Ascione listened intently as the narrative unfolded.

More steps, and Mrs. Ascione passed the actual Baldizzi apartment, on the third floor, and pressed onward to the fourth floor, home to the Bonofiglios.

“Ma, where was the tub?” her daughter asked as she entered the Bonofiglio apartment, now empty.

Her mother smiled, almost triumphantly. “There was no tub,” she said.

Like the three other families on their floor, the Bonofiglios lived in cramped quarters, three rooms squeezed into 325 square feet. Mrs. Ascione shared a rollout bed with her sister.

All eyes searched for the bathroom, in vain. Two of the four apartments on each floor shared a toilet in the hallway. “You had to knock on the door,” Mrs. Ascione said, amused. “You had to wait. At night, you had a little potty, like the kids.”

Mrs. Ascione does not remember precisely when she moved into 97 Orchard Street. Her family history is blurry. Her parents were no longer living together when her mother, an immigrant from Calabria, took her daughters to Orchard Street. Maria Bonofiglio was blind, perhaps a consequence of diabetes. Her sister worked at a candy factory, possibly the family’s sole source of income. What she does remember is her first meeting with Josie, who was sitting on the stoop. “I pinched her cheeks and made her cry,” she recalled. From this inauspicious beginning, friendship grew. Rita, tiny but scrappy, needed an ally. Josephine took on the role. At P.S. 42, on Hester Street, Josie kept a watchful eye on Rita and came to her rescue at times.

“She was tough, really tough,” Maria Capio, Josephine’s daughter, said of Rita in a telephone interview. “My mother told me, ‘She’d get into fights, I’d have to break them up and then I’d get into trouble.’ ”

Rita and Josie remained best friends until Josie’s death in 1998.

Mrs. Ascione lived a protected life at 97 Orchard. The kids spent long hours sitting on the stoop, often in their pajamas, venturing farther only with an escort. Rose took Rita and Josie to the Loews cinema on Delancey, where a quarter got you admission and a plate. There were shopping expeditions to Essex Street, where the goods were sold in pushcarts and stalls, and the prices were unmarked. “The lemon ice man used to pass,” Mrs. Ascione said. “He’d ring a bell, but he came around supper time, which was the wrong time, because you’d want an ice cream instead of supper.”

In summer, when the heat became unbearable, the family spread blankets on the roof, where they drank coffee and spent the night. “We didn’t have air conditioning,” Mrs. Ascione said. “In fact, I don’t think we even had a fan.” On Friday evenings, the Italian children in the building watched, curious, as their Jewish neighbors headed to synagogue. There were other points of fascination. Offhandedly, Mrs. Ascione said of her neighbors, “There were three men living upstairs, two gay guys.” She did not elaborate.

The little world of 97 Orchard came to an end when the building was condemned after the landlord refused to make improvements required by the Multiple Dwelling Act of 1929. David Favaloro, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs, said: “Enforcement had been postponed because of the Depression, but by the mid-1930s that had changed. The nail in the coffin for 97 Orchard was the stoop, the stairways and the hallways, which would have had to be gutted and replaced with fireproof material.” The building, one of the first generation of New York tenements, remained unoccupied until 1988, when two social historians, Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson, acquired it to create a museum that would honor immigrants to the United States and document their lives.

At 97 Orchard, these were working-class lives, made tougher by the Depression. Mrs. Ascione, however, recalls a happy time. “I have good memories, she said, “although my cousin Johnny got hit by a car on his birthday.”

She paused. “There was plenty of food, nice clothes,” she said. “We didn’t feel that we needed anything. I had a good childhood.”

Mr. Favaloro pointed to the spiffy new shops and restaurants that have made the Lower East Side one of the most desirable areas in Manhattan. He asked her, “Rita, what do you think of the neighborhood now?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s all right,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Artifact Once Was Just Home. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe